How to Delete Photos from iPhone & iCloud

This guide will show you how to delete photos from iPhone and iCloud in one quick action from your iPhone, iPad or from iCloud on a Mac or a PC.

With iOS 8 Apple changed the way iCloud works and offers a new and improved way to use iCloud for photos that does not rely on PhotoStream only showing you 1,000 photos from the last 30 days. The new iCloud Photo Library feature allows you to keep your entire set of photos linked between all of your devices and iCloud.

Read: iOS 8 Tips & Tricks

Thanks to this change, you can now find any photo you want on iCloud, your Mac, PC, iPad or iPhone — no matter where you took the photo. You will need to turn on iCloud Photo Library to use this new option, but once you do this and allow the library to sync it will be much easier to keep delete photos from iPhone & iCloud with one tap.

You need to use iOS 8 or higher for this guide to work, which means you need an iPhone 4s or newer and iPad 2 and newer running at least iOS 8. After you set this up, you can delete a photo from all of your devices at the same time, so you don’t need to worry about an embarrassing photo ending up on all of your devices and then forgetting to delete it from one spot.

If you aren’t already using iCloud Photo Library, or what you may also know as iCloud Photos, you need to turn this on. Go to Settings -> iCloud -> Photos -> iCloud Photo Library (Beta) to On. You can learn more about how to use iCloud Photo Library on iOS 8 in our guide to the new service. This is a great way to keep your photos and videos backed up to iCloud and all of your devices — and it makes deleting a photo from iCloud and your iPhone incredibly easy.

To delete a photo from iCloud and your iPhone, as well as all of your other devices, you need to follow these steps.

Open the Photos app on your iPhone -> tap on the Photo you want -> Tap on the trash icon -> Confirm that you want to delete the photo. Within a few minutes it will be deleted from iCloud and all of your other devices as well.

You can also do this on the web at iCloud Photos. Log in to iCloud with your Apple ID -> Click on Photos -> Click on the Photo you want to delete -> Click on the trash icon.

That’s all you need to do to make sure that your photos are no longer on iCloud or your iPhone. If you accidentally delete a photo it is stored in the Recently Deleted Photos Album for 30-days. You can find this in Photos ->Albums -> Recently Deleted. From here you can Recover or Delete the photo permanently with one more tap. You can learn more about how to recover deleted photos on the iPhone in our guide.